Alice Sebold - The Almost Moon

I stood then and walked toward the door. I thought of the game of shadow the girls had played when they were small, in which one of them walked right behind the other, turning left when the other turned, leaning right when the other leaned, so that the one in front could never see the shadow girl.

I could see Natalie and Jake talking in the room opposite. Both of them had taken seats in the front row of what was a more traditional classroom used for art history and Western thought classes. The desk part of the molded chairs was a light lemon yellow and curved around their bodies.

I saw the policemen walking down the hallway, Detective Broumas slightly behind the two uniformed officers. He was talking on his cell phone. I heard him say “hair ribbon” to someone in a directive tone and then the word “braid.”

Jake, who was facing toward the door, spied me first.

Natalie turned awkwardly around in the school chair and looked at me. “I don’t even know who you are sometimes,” she said.

I felt my stomach drop. I started to speak but then saw Jake vigorously shaking his head side to side and mouthing, No.

There was only one other thing Natalie could be referring to. Why would he have told her?

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“You’ve known him since he was a baby.”

This didn’t matter to me. Plenty of fifty-year-old men slept with thirty-year-old women, and I was certain that among their number were those who had known their conquests as infants. Unfortunately the only person I could think of just then was John Ruskin and a ten-year-old named Rose la Touche.

“It was mutual,” I said.

“Jesus,” Natalie spat out. She looked away from me and toward the blackboard. I followed her glance. One of the students had taken advantage of an emptying classroom to draw a giant penis on the board. The caricature fellating it looked an awful lot like Tanner.

“You slept with Hamish?” Jake asked, incredulous.

“Last night, in her car,” Natalie said. “I called home to tell him about your mother, and he comes out with that! He says he’s in love with you.”

“Did you tell the police I was with him?” I asked, knowing that it conflicted with what I’d just said.

“That’s what you care about? That’s all you have to say?”

Jake was staring at me now. “You took him to the Limerick spot.” It was not a question.

I nodded my head.

Natalie’s dress, as often happened, had loosened, and the deep overlapping V of the neckline now hung low and open, revealing her bra and her ample cleavage.

In comparison I felt like a twig that could be snapped underfoot-brittle, insubstantial, combustible. Fodder for fire or lust. “There’s an autopsy scheduled for this afternoon,” I said. “She was killed somewhere other than where her body was found.”

Natalie stood. She walked over to me.

I bowed my head, avoiding her gaze.

“I guess I should congratulate him,” she said. “Hamish has wanted a run at you for a long time.”

“And me?” I asked.

“Truth?”

“Yes.”

“I’m tired. I’m tired of living in that stupid house and of this job, and I’m seeing someone.”

“A Downingtown contractor,” I said.

“Of course you don’t approve.”

“I’m not in a position to judge anyone right now,” I said.

Natalie brought her hand up to my cheek. A gesture, I was aware, that Hamish also used. “But you do.”

The three of us left the Art Hut. In my joints I felt the ache of tension-the accruing of the previous night’s deeds with posing and the police questioning. I wanted desperately to go and sit where I had that morning, overlooking the rotten oak tree behind the building.

“Remember my father’s plywood people?” I said to Natalie. We stood in the parking lot. Jake’s red car glistened in the sun.

“Yes.” She had seen them only once, shortly before they’d finally been demolished. Jake had only heard about them.

“They were more real to him than my mother and me.”

“I feel sick looking at you,” she said.

She dug in her shoulder bag for her keys. They were easy to spot. After she had lost them dozens of times, Hamish had presented her with a key chain topped off by a giant red cat.

Jake tried to fill the space. “Sarah is coming on one of her visits today. We won’t have the happiest news to greet her with, I’m afraid.”

He had put his hands in his pockets, which he had always done to keep himself from fidgeting. Out of nowhere I thought of the shirt he was wearing beneath his sweater: “Life is good.”

“I’m headed up to York with my contractor. I’m meeting his mother for the first time,” Natalie said to Jake. She would not look at me. I had suddenly become the unstable one to their upright citizens. Had I killed the only person who, in comparison, made me appear sane?

Moments later I was lying curled up in the backseat of Jake’s car just as I had the night before in my own. Natalie had turned from me with no good-bye.

“Take care,” she said to Jake.

“It was nice to see you again, Natalie.”

“I guess it was,” she said. Jake started the car, and I closed my eyes. I would ride in the back the way I had as a child, with my father driving and no one in the front passenger side. I hadn’t told Natalie about my mother, and now I never would.

After the remaining parts of Lambeth were destroyed to make way for a new bypass and an outlet mall, I had written down a line for my father: “All of them are gone except for me; and for me nothing is gone.” I couldn’t remember who had said it or in what context.

When Jake stopped drawing me, I thought his fascination with the way ice coated a leaf or the way crushed berries mixed with snow could make a dye was a temporary fancy. I thought he would come back to me. But then he began building things out of earth and ice, sticks and bones, and left all human flesh behind.

Emily found one of his first crude sculptures and marveled. It was made out of grass and dirt woven together, the grass of winter acting as a thatch to keep the mud from disassembling. If it were not for Emily’s delight, I would quickly have grabbed it with a covered hand and flushed it away. It looked like a particularly nuanced piece of shit to me, sitting as it did on the floor behind the toilet. But because Emily made me get down on my hands and knees first, and called it “him,” I had a chance to see.

Jake had made a small sculpture. As I stared at it, openmouthed, Emily launched, as only a small child’s body could, in one swift motion from bent knees to sitting with legs stretched out in front of her and began to bang the flat of her palms on her fleshy thighs with joy.

“Daddy!” she screamed.

“She’s afraid of the toilet, Helen,” Jake said later, after I had brought out the offending object and placed it on the small ceramic dish where he put his keys and change at the end of the day.

“And this is how you propose to cure her? By making donkeys out of shit?”

“It’s mud, and it’s supposed to be a dragon.”

If I wanted to talk to him in those days, I had to stop him between the front door of the small house we rented and the shower. He would begin to disrobe in the hallway, peeling off the layers of scarves and hats, parka and vest, and heavy wool plaid shirts so that by the time he hit the bedroom, he was dressed like a normal man about to sit down to dinner.

That day I had chased him from the front door to the bedroom with the sculpture held aloft on its ceramic dish.

“Did she like it?” he asked as we reached the bedroom.

He wore his rag-wool sweater over a turtleneck and, I knew because I watched the routine in the dark each morning, hidden layers of T-shirts and long underwear. First to come off before entering the house were always his boots, but still on his lower half were the old army pants from the surplus store and huge wool socks that looked as prickly as cacti and that necessitated liners between them and his humid, winter-tenderized feet. On his hands he wore nothing, swearing that as they acclimatized to the cold, he would ultimately become more dexterous, able to stand more hours outside and capable of finer detail work.